All Growed Up

The youngest child is graduating from college in a few weeks. God, do I feel old!

He made his last trip home for the semester this week and I took the opportunity to get a quick head and shoulders shot of him to include in the graduation announcements.

Looks like a very typical sort of outdoor shot with a soft, diffused light from the front and the sun providing highlights on the rear quarter. Except in this case, he wanted to be shot in front of our grape fines, even though they are still void of leaves from the winter. And that meant facing toward the sun rather than away from it.

To rectify the situation and give us acceptable quality of lighting, I had my wife standing to the left of him holding a large diffuser up between him and the sun. It was late in the day and there were a few clouds hanging about that periodically softened the sunlight, but the use of the diffuser guaranteed that we had an acceptable soft light source for his face.

Then I placed a gridded flash to his rear right and set it at about 1 stop above the ambient light level that I was shooting at. I probably could have more closely approximated sunlight by adding a CTO gel. But I think the effect is still quite convincing.

He actually showed me a nifty little Photoshop technique to produce this bit of desaturated/pastel color look. After doing all of the other typical retouches like contrast, color, etc, I added a Black and White adjustment layer. With the B&W adjustment layer in place, I played with the color channel sliders to darken the shirt abit and cranked the red up some to give that classic red filter appearance to the skin. Finally, I turned the opacity of the B&W layer down to about 70%, allowing a touch of the underlying colors to show through.

I really like the overall effect, which gives a little more contemporary look for a subject his age.